D&D 5E Odd things in the rules that bug you?

[Don Durito]

It's not so much that they were poor decisions as there was not enough effort put into understanding what the individual components & systems interactions did in those elements before streamlining them. Take the 27 mechanically distinct pole arms that caused decision paralysis vrs the two pole arms that are effectively identical as an example.

You see this kind of problem A being removed entirely & overly simplified to create problem B thing time & again, but the most glaring obvious example of just how little nuance went into so many of these simplifications if you compare the rare handy haversack to the objectively better in every way uncommon bag of holding & go back to see why the handysack used to be better by allowing you to get thins from it without provoking an AoO despite smaller size. Whatever order decisions were made, it's not like the bag of holding is too obscure to cross index when going through the handy haversack to remove the container interaction not provoking an AoO once everything that AoOs for various actions did to enable tactical combat were deemed bad & that phb190 list was settled on.

I'm thinking of rules elements like Great Weapon Fighter (designed to hearken back to the Power Attack days in which great-weapon fighters were better than all other fighters and ending in largely the same place) more feats than anyone else being a fighter thing, the whole design of the Ranger class (when the 4E Essentials scout pretty much had it nailed), including a spell list of spells with highly situational spells and an extremely limited number of known spells. Even the general design of a lot of the fighting feats which are about making your fighter all about spamming one specific thing ad nauseum.

 

[tetrasodium]

I'm thinking of rules elements like Great Weapon Fighter (designed to hearken back to the Power Attack days in which great-weapon fighters were better than all other fighters and ending in largely the same place) more feats than anyone else being a fighter thing, the whole design of the Ranger class (when the 4E Essentials scout pretty much had it nailed), including a spell list of spells with highly situational spells and an extremely limited number of known spells. Even the general design of a lot of the fighting feats which are about making your fighter all about spamming one specific thing ad nauseum.

GWM is another victim of oversimplification. It grew from a simplified power attack, but there were numerous other elements that got removed or nullified. Power attack was the hit it llike a truck& charging builds you had Parallel to it were things like charcrit fishing builds that went for hitting something many times that was frequently a crit but could rely on rheir entire attack chain with just the -5/-10/etc for second/third/etc attacktat made power attack generally a one/round & done thing. The crit fishing buid was impacted to a greater degree by DR & both had weapons suited for their indiviual use cases on so much more than ie size & "can U use it with this feat?" Meanwhile 5 resistance hurts the hit it once hard builds to a greater degree & being kinf the support for those builds is "lacking"

 

[Iry]

You can't improve life skills without getting better at combat or finding magic items. Want to blacksmith? You need to level to improve your proficiency, feats, or ASI. You can't just blacksmith and get better.

 

[SkidAce]

YES! Pleeeeeeease!?

Obligatory for fans of polearms

 

[SkidAce]

Link to source for credit....

Order of the Stick

 

[Immoralkickass]

Grappling and Shoving rules do bug me.

Grappling requires only 1 free hand, so you can grapple 2 creatures with 1 hand each, but using both hands to grapple one creature doesn't give you an advantage. If the creature being grappled has an ally, you can never hold on to him because his ally can simply shove him, and he can choose to fail the check to be shoved away from the grappler. Also, he can be shoved away even if 3 guys are grappling him.

Doesn't matter if you have 3 strength of 30 strength, you can only shove a creature 5 ft away, and always drag a grappled creature for half speed. That means speed is actually more important at dragging grappled creatures than strength.

 

[Don Durito]

GWM is another victim of oversimplification. It grew from a simplified power attack, but there were numerous other elements that got removed or nullified. Power attack was the hit it llike a truck& charging builds you had Parallel to it were things like charcrit fishing builds that went for hitting something many times that was frequently a crit but could rely on rheir entire attack chain with just the -5/-10/etc for second/third/etc attacktat made power attack generally a one/round & done thing. The crit fishing buid was impacted to a greater degree by DR & both had weapons suited for their indiviual use cases on so much more than ie size & "can U use it with this feat?" Meanwhile 5 resistance hurts the hit it once hard builds to a greater degree & being kinf the support for those builds is "lacking"

See nothing in what you say there sounds prefereable to me.

 

[Don Durito]

Shields plus Quarterstaffs.

I mean...seriously!

 

[Bacon Bits]

Shields plus Quarterstaffs.

I mean...seriously!

Conceptually, this doesn't bother me. If a spear and shield work, so should a staff and spear. It shouldn't do the same damage, though. Spears are underpowered.

We've covered this before elsewhere, but the problem is that there isn't quite enough granularity. The weapons should be: truncheon/club, cane/bat/staff, quarterstaff, and greatclub. The trouble is that club is d4, mace is d6, quarterstaff is d6/d8, and greatclub is d8. Club is already unplayable compared to dagger, and greatclub being limited to d8 is very restrictive. Simply put there's not really a tremendously good reason for simple weapons to be worse than martial ones. Like I'm ready to discard that notion. I'd rather say that certain classes just get more interesting benefits from weapons.

I'm boggled by the fact that Crossbow Expert means that crossbows are both interior to bows and the weapon of choice for true ranged experts. It harms my suspension of disbelief everytime I think of it.

I'm boggled by how terrible standard human is. 3e worked so hard to make humans decent and then they put zero design effort in for 5e.

I'm boggled by darkvision's ubiquity. It's a bad mechanic that spoils how about 90% of DMs describe the world. Nobody plays quite right because the rules for lightly obscured are two steps away. Like a torch is as bright as a camp fire, and torches have 20' of bright light plus 20' of dim light. I can't imagine trying to read by the light of a camp fire 20' away.

I boggle on the warlock quite a bit:

Devil's sight is a stupid ability. It's either irrelevant or dominates an encounter with basically no room in between. It either never comes up or it's overpowering.

The ruling on eldritch blast and agonizing blast is awful. It's the only thing like that in the whole game, and it's so potent that it's all most warlocks ever do. It leaves the rest of the class shallow and sparse.

The ruling that the warlocks power explicitly has no debt or obligation or consequences feels so gamist that it's absurd. Here's a bunch of cool flavor and possible character hooks from making a Faustian bargain... except, nope, you just got power for nothing. That's what cosmic horrors, fairy courts, and literal demon and devil lords are famous for: consorting with mortals and just giving them stuff for free with no strings attached. Sorry, can't have the possibility that some DM might be mean to you by making your back story be relevant to the campaign!

 

[Don Durito]

Conceptually, this doesn't bother me. If a spear and shield work, so should a staff and spear. It shouldn't do the same damage, though. Spears are underpowered.

Yes. This. If you want to use it as a blunt spear, then I don't have an issue. It needs to go down one die type from a spear however.

We've covered this before elsewhere, but the problem is that there isn't quite enough granularity. The weapons should be: truncheon/club, cane/bat/staff, quarterstaff, and greatclub. The trouble is that club is d4, mace is d6, quarterstaff is d6/d8, and greatclub is d8. Club is already unplayable compared to dagger, and greatclub being limited to d8 is very restrictive. Simply put there's not really a tremendously good reason for simple weapons to be worse than martial ones. Like I'm ready to discard that notion. I'd rather say that certain classes just get more interesting benefits from weapons.

I'm boggled by the fact that Crossbow Expert means that crossbows are both interior to bows and the weapon of choice for true ranged experts. It harms my suspension of disbelief everytime I think of it.

I'm boggled by how terrible standard human is. 3e worked so hard to make humans decent and then they put zero design effort in for 5e.

I'm boggled by darkvision's ubiquity. It's a bad mechanic that spoils how about 90% of DMs describe the world. Nobody plays quite right because the rules for lightly obscured are two steps away. Like a torch is as bright as a camp fire, and torches have 20' of bright light plus 20' of dim light. I can't imagine trying to read by the light of a camp fire 20' away.

I boggle on the warlock quite a bit:

Devil's sight is a stupid ability. It's either irrelevant or dominates an encounter with basically no room in between. It either never comes up or it's overpowering.

The ruling on eldritch blast and agonizing blast is awful. It's the only thing like that in the whole game, and it's so potent that it's all most warlocks ever do. It leaves the rest of the class shallow and sparse.

The ruling that the warlocks power explicitly has no debt or obligation or consequences feels so gamist that it's absurd. Here's a bunch of cool flavor and possible character hooks from making a Faustian bargain... except, nope, you just got power for nothing. That's what cosmic horrors, fairy courts, and literal demon and devil lords are famous for: consorting with mortals and just giving them stuff for free with no strings attached. Sorry, can't have the possibility that some DM might be mean to you by making your back story be relevant to the campaign!

I agree with every one of these things.

Two things I really loved about 13th Age was that it removed Darkvision from the game and made weapon damage a feature of class.

I'm increasingly thinking I should go back to 13th Age and work on fixing the things about it that bother me.

The main reason I've stuck with 5E over it is player enthusiasm for official D&D.